Down but not out, it's business as usual for OCZ Technology, which today introduced its next-generation Intrepid 3000 Series of enterprise-class SATA III solid state drives. OCZ claims its new drives offer the best sustained performance and consistent I/O responses of any SSDs aimed at enterprise applications. The Intrepid 3000 line comes in storage capacities up to 800GB and leverage OCZ's Everest 2 platform, which consists of a combination of the Marvell 88SS9187 controller with OCZ's proprietary firmware, or secret sauce, if you will.

The Intrepid 3000 Series is optimized to deliver consistent I/O responses while performing at fast speeds. OCZ rates the drives as being able to achieve up to 520MB/s sequential read (128K blocks) and up to 470MB/s sequential write (128K blocks) performance, along with 91,000 IOPS for random reads (4K blocks) and 40,000 IOPS for random writes (4K blocks). Compared to OCZ's previous generation enterprise SATA III SSDs based on Deneva 2, this new series offers five times faster sustained performance for 4K write operations and twice the sustained performance for 4K read operations.

"Our new Intrepid 3000 Series leverages in-house firmware with an impressive enterprise feature-set to enable customers with unprecedented performance, data management, endurance and reliability, and cost flexibility resulting in an optimal storage environment," said Daryl Lang, SVP of Product Management for OCZ Technology. "Delivering exceptional SSD responsiveness in even the most demanding and compute-intensive applications, the Intrepid 3000 Series achieves unsurpassed performance under any workload, regardless of data type and I/O pattern for the complete spectrum of applications including online archiving, media streaming and web browsing OLTP, VDI, email and analytics."

As these drives are intended to withstand the daily rigors of enterprise environments, they boast special features to enhance reliability, including strong multi-level BCH error correction coding (ECC) that corrects errors up to 85 bits per 2Kb of data while significantly reducing the uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER), OCZ says. Data integrity checks are performed at every junction where data is transmitted, received, processed, and stored to ensure that corrupted data is detected and not propagated.

There are two versions of the Intrepid 3000 Series available, both of which utilize the 2.5-inch form factor. The Intrepid 3600 line uses cost-effective multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory while the Intrepid 3800 family kicks it up a notch with high-endurance enterprise MLC (eMLC) NAND media.

Both configurations are available in 100GB, 200GB, 400GB, and 800GB capacities. No word yet on price, though OCZ says they will be available in the first quarter of 2014.